How to make Twitter conversations more ‘healthy’

20/10/2018by Big Data Alliance

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Leiden University, Syracuse University, Bocconi University and TU Delft received grants from Twitter to research and develop tools to assess the quality of the discussions on its social media platform. One of the researchers, Dr Nava Tintarev of the TU Delft explains in Delta (Journalistic Platform TU Delft) how this research project focuses on two potentially problematic features of Twitter interactions: the presence of echo chambers and uncivil and intolerant discourse.

Dr Nava Tintarev explains the project’s more analytical aim to understand the prevalence of algorithmic filtering, resulting in the potentially negative effect of ‘echo chambers’ narrowing the view of the world for users. The more practical aim is to potentially develop a diagnostic tool for users to assess their ‘conversational health’, that possibly helps users to detect the algorithmically narrowing filter bubbles and to consciously counter it by widening their views.